Reposted from gnome.org One of the most important things you can do in a free software project, besides writing code, is to get your key contributors together as often as possible. I’ve been fortunate to be able to organise a number of events in the past 10 years, and also to observe others and learn [...]

Yesterday I looked into what it means to be a maintainer of a package. Today, I’m going to examine how to effect change in a distribution like MeeGo, and what it means to work upstream. To do so, we’re going to look at how code gets from a developer’s brain into the hands of a [...]

I was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a change of plan from what I presented yesterday: The report is now available under a Creative Commons license. Why the change of heart? My intention was never to [...]

Today at GUADEC I presented the results (Slides are now on slideshare) of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME? How many paid [...]

Reposted from my personal blog Who knew that educating people in simple sabotage (defined as sabotage not requiring in-depth training or materials) could have so much in common with communicating free software values? I read the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (pdf) which has been doing the rounds of management and security blogs recently, and [...]

I’m delighted to announce the availability of GNOME Developer Training at GUADEC this year. It’s been brewing for a while, but you can now register for the training sessions on the GUADEC website. Fernando Herrera, Claudio Saavedra, Alberto Garcia and myself will be running the two-day course, covering the basics of a Linux development environment [...]

Mal Minhas of the LiMo Foundation announced and presented a white paper at OSiM World called “Mobile Open Source Economic Analysis” (PDF link). Mal argues that by forking off a version of a free software component to adjust it to your needs, run intensive QA, and ship it in a device (a process which can [...]

Jono Bacon asked on the Art of Community blog for successful governance stories, and while I’m happy to comment on the blog, now that I’ve taken the time to write some down, I thought I might as well share them. Governance comes in many shapes & sizes of course. My favourite governance stories are about [...]

A collection of recent articles of interest:  From the archives: the best distros of 2000 | TuxRadar: A trip down Linux distribution memory lane – back to the day when WindowMaker was considered “an attractive alternative” to Enlightenment, the old default GNOME window manager. Polymorph: Hacking Business Models: A few months ago, Monty Widenius and [...]

This is an article accompanying the presentation given by Dave Neary to MAPOS 08 in London on December 9th 2008. Moving the Mobile industry from purchasing to co-development in free software communities Recently, Matt Aslett wrote an article about the way that attitudes to free software evolve over time within a company, using a graphic [...]